ABSTRACT
The border between 'biological' sex and 'cultural' gender carefully created by gender scholarship in the 1980s, for example, had by 2000 become increasingly permeable, unstable, murky, and perhaps even illusory. As in global and transnational history, these debates in the history of gender and sexuality have to some degree centered on the double meaning of the perplexing prefix 'trans', which can mean both 'across' and 'beyond'. Susan Stryker, one of transgender history's most influential theorists, has noted ways in which debates about gender and sexual borders have led to consideration of other types of spatial, disciplinary, and temporal borders. The increasing levels of interaction that are fundamental to the early modern period often involved the movement of large numbers of people over vast distances. Intermarriage and other types of sexual relationships among individuals from different groups occurred especially in colonies or border regions that Kathleen Brown has labeled 'gender frontiers'.
